minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project
you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and
the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon,
except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but
notice it or something shocks you or captures your eye. Then
for a moment you stick your head out and realize, “Wow! Look
at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!”
T
HE GREAT FOURTEENTH-CENTURY Tibetan
teacher Longchenpa talked about our useless and
meaningless focus on the details—getting so caught
up we don’t see what is in front of our nose. He said
that this useless focus extends moment by moment
into a continuum, and days, months, and even whole lives go
by. Do you spend your whole time just thinking about things,
distracting yourself with your own mind, completely lost in
thought? I know this habit so well myself. It is the human pre-
dicament. It is what the Buddha recognized and what all the
living teachers since then have recognized. This is what we are
up against.
“Yes, but...,” we say. Yes, but... I have a job to do, there is
a deadline, there is an endless amount of email I have to deal
with, I have cooking and cleaning and errands. How are we
supposed to juggle all that we have to do in a day, in a week, in
a month, without missing our precious opportunity to experi-
ence who we really are?
Not only do we have a precious human life, but that precious
human life is made up of precious human days, and those pre-
cious human days are made up of precious human moments.
How we spend them is really important. Yes, we do have jobs
to do—we don’t just sit around meditating all day, even at a
Buddhist monastery. We have the real nitty-gritty of relation-
ships—how we live together, how we rub up against each other.
Going off by ourselves, getting away from the people we think
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